Could the Web Not be Invented Today? 267
An anonymous reader writes " Corante's
Copyfight has a
piece up about this new column
in the Financial Times by James Boyle celebrating (a few days on the
early side) the 15th
anniversary of
Berners-Lee's first
draft of a web page .
The hook is this question: What would happen if the Web were
invented today? From the article: 'What would a web designed by the World
Intellectual Property Organisation or the Disney Corporation have
looked like? It would have looked more like pay-television, or
Minitel, the French computer network. Beforehand, the logic of
control always makes sense. Allow anyone to connect to the network?
Anyone to decide what content to put up? That is a recipe for piracy
and pornography. And of course it is. But it is also much, much
more...The lawyers have learnt their lesson now...When the next
disruptive communications technology - the next worldwide web -
is thought up, the lawyers and the logic of control will be much more
evident. That is not a happy thought.'"
Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:5, Insightful)
We had Compuserve, Prodigy, Bix, eWorld, and probably a dozen other big ones that I can't recall. All of them got steam rolled by the internet because it was so 'disruptive'. One of the properties of being disruptive means upheaval and loss of a certain amount of control.
Perhaps google will introduce the next phase of communications through wireless gateways that are free, and put cell phone providers in the category of technological has beens...who really knows what will work and what will fail until it is done?
Remember (Score:2, Insightful)
It's an impossible scenario (Score:5, Insightful)
If the internet were created today, none of us would be online. We'd still be doing all the tedious tasks like making phone calls to clients and friends, and using hardbound encyclopedias and journals to find information. Newspapers would be making a ton of money selling ad space and subscriptions. Television would probably have a lot more content related to the writers' and producers' interests rather than based on viewer feedback.
In short, if the Internet were invented today, it would not have reached us mere mortals yet. And there is no reason to think that an Internet created in 2005 would be significantly different or more advanced than the Internet created in 1974.
The Internet itself has changed the rules of intellectual property. Without it, the media conglomerates would not be in the tizzy that they currently are in. It is precisely because of the ease of broadcast that the Internet gives us that we have media content creators trying to find ways to use the law to restrict users. In very real terms, the Internet that we are talking about here is the one created 1999 by Shawn Fanning. Until the arrival of Napster, Internet piracy was a drop in the bucket. Now it is one of the most often used features of the Internet, and it is because of that initial software that media companies sat up and took notice of all the copyrighted bits being transmitted right under their noses.
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:4, Insightful)
I think (may be mis stating this) Napster was around for at least a year before the lawyers made their way into court. Of course, that just proves that "better late than never" is also on the lawyers play card.
Lets hope they don't shut down the current web as we know it!
The internet wouldn't exist, PERIOD. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Thanks Tim! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:3, Insightful)
Else there'd be a lot of people being sued for piracy at your 18th birthday since "Well, we figure you'll pirate SOMETIME in the future if you haven't already."
subnote: The RIAA does not take into account that consumer spending was shifted after the stock market's y2k-bubble burst. Therefore their entire belief that 'p2p is the devil and is causing us to lose money' is moot because they were going to lose anyways- people could not afford to spend as much money (if at all) as they used to on CDs/other merchandise. Therefore they would have experienced a relatively same fall in their overall bottom line, which then they would have found something else to convieniently blame it on. I know many people who lost at least 30% of their yearly income because of the y2k-burst and no longer could afford to buy cds or any other useless crap.
Re:It's an impossible scenario (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, the article is asking you to consider how a massively disruptive new communications technology would be developed, if we understood its implications in advance. The very first thing to become obvious when you consider this is that one of the fundamental principles of disruptive developments is that we do not and cannot understand them in advance.
Might as well write an article asking us to consider what sex would be like if we started out by having the orgasm, and then moved on to intimate touching. Easy enough to consider, but so far removed from reality as to be an exercise whose brevity was exceeded only by its pointlessness. Kind of like the exercise being proposed here.
All in jest I know... (Score:4, Insightful)
Electricity (Score:3, Insightful)
If electricity were discovered today, it would be deemed too dangerous for the public.
It would easily be invented today (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it would have been much slower to penetrate the US market, but that would not mean it couldn't exist basically as it does now.
There have been recent articles here about how the US is slipping into a technical dark age. This is just one more example of how that's true.
Re:What!? (Score:1, Insightful)
No, I don't like the default US. assumption that any important invention is made by an US. citizen...
The same can be said about the Public Library (Score:1, Insightful)
Of course, nevermind the public benefit and educational value of public libraries. The copyright industry today believes it is entitled to dictate every use of a copyrighted work, including getting paid. We're not talking about giving authors a living and incentive to create more works here. We're talking about making one work and collecting royalties on it for a century or more, while ensuring (by twisting the law) that you (as the consumer) get less value while spending more of your money to get it.
It is only the fact that the public library's value has been demonstrated today is why going after the libraries is political suicide for the copyright industry. Because if Congresscritters had to use foresight instead of hindsight to see the benefits of the public library, then the insane interpretations of copyright by Congress and the copyright industry virtually guarantees that they wouldn't exist. The RIAA tried to kill used CD sales in the past, but failed. Just wait 10 years for the RIAA to make that depriving artists/decreasing potential revenue argument again, to a more receptive Congress.
Re:First thing we must do... (Score:5, Insightful)
I seriously hope you are joking. There's a bunch of problems with that idea that are immediately obvious. First, the main problem is that there is no hard line "right" and "wrong" in most cases. Whys is it safe to go 64.9 mph but 65.1 mph is unsafe? That's unreasonable. However, the law has to say something because going way to fast is definitely dangerous. The "reasonableness" is often part of the law. The only way to program that is with some sort of fuzzy logic.
Second, related to the first, is that the problem with the ambiguity of the law now is that it is, in fact, being written like computer syntax. Since there are few absolutes, all sorts of exceptions (if ... then) and variability ("reasonable") have to be built in. Ambiguities tend to be these cases. "Don't kill" is easy. Except self-defense. Except defense of a third person. If you are insane, different punishment. How abonormal do you have to be to be insane? Who judges? And so forth. That is exactly why laws are unreadable, because they try to fill loopholes and cover all cases like a computer program needs to do.
Third, how they hell are people supposed to understand what the law says? People speak in English, they don't speak computer languages. Programmers might be able to reverse engineer it, so then the programmers would effectively become the lawyers, which in follow the second problem above, is exactly the case now. Lawyers reverse engineer the language of the law to see what it says.
In short, computer-like syntax is the problem here already. Unfortunately, since all situations are essentially different, and there are few absolute rights and wrongs, there is no real solution that works well.
Re:Disruptive technologies can't be controlled. (Score:1, Insightful)
You know, I keep seeing variations on that phrase. But not once has any significant technology been invented by teenage kids in darkened bedrooms. It's a romantic notion, but it's also complete bullshit.
Instead, we get disruptive technologies almost exclusively from highly trained scientists and engineers, who tend both to be fortuitously intelligent and to have worked their asses off for years to accrue the knowledge and insight upon which their inventions are based.
Stay in school, kids.